


Hell to Pay

by battle_cat



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Child Death Mention, Great Fire of London, Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Whump, sorry kids it'll all be okay in about 350 years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 09:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20468960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: In the midst of the Great Fire of London, Crowley does an emergency good deed too undemonic for Hell to ignore. There are consequences, and they don't come in the form of a rude note.





	Hell to Pay

**Author's Note:**

> This is what comes from thinking too much about "my lot don't send rude notes." Despite the tags and the archive warning, I don't think this is particularly graphic in terms of descriptions of violence. But we are pretty solidly in hurt-no-comfort territory so skip this one if that's not your jam.

Crowley has tested out, over his millennia on Earth, just what exactly he can get away with doing without Hell noticing.

He wants to know, when he proposes the Arrangement, that he will actually be able to hold up his end of the bargain. So he experiments: carefully, patiently, one step at a time. A small blessing here, a minor good deed there. A miracle that cannot strictly speaking be claimed as demonic.

He figures out quickly that Hell couldn’t care less about miracles he does to give himself Earth’s luxuries or make his physical form look a certain way. Part of his job to inspire Envy and Lust, isn’t it? They don’t seem to notice or care about anything he does to inanimate objects, really. Animals are fine too; he can heal and even raise them and Hell pays it no mind.

With humans, he is always careful to maintain plausible deniability, making sure to think up a clever way to put a bad spin on something if he’s asked about it. But they never ask.

Then London is on fire. 

The city is a disaster waiting to happen. Overcrowded, terribly flammable tenements teetering to near touching over the narrow streets, held together with pitch and tar and timber and straw, peppered with cooking fires and forges and foundries and loads of black powder still lingering from the civil war, escapable only through a handful of narrow Roman gates and a single, congested bridge, all of it tinder-dry in the late summer heat. One spark in the dead of night and it’s an inferno.

Crowley is not afraid of fire, human-made or otherwise. So he stays in the city and works. Not Hell’s work, but his own.

He doesn’t even _like_ bloody London, he thinks, as he miracles safe pathways through the burning streets. Grubby little collection of slums around a sewagey river. Plague-ridden, dirty, crowded, frequently damp and always cold. Pathetic, really, compared to the grandeur of Constantinople or Beijing. (He smothers some sparks before they can set that roof ablaze.) It’s only due to a certain insufferably sentimental angel that he finds himself spending so much time here, doing things like glaring at that bit of wattle and letting it know in no uncertain terms that it will not collapse until the last person runs out.

He is careful, still, among the heat and the flames and the panic. Always careful.

But then.

There is a house, burning, and a woman, screaming, three of her four children clinging to her singed skirt. Screaming for the fourth one, still inside. He doesn’t remember deciding to go inside the house but he is inside the house, ducking under a collapsed roof beam. The kid is there, in the back room, and he’s dead.

Except. Except he’s only _just_ gone; it can only have been seconds (if he’d been a few seconds earlier, a few seconds faster—) and Crowley can _see_ his soul; it’s _there, right there;_ it’s beyond the veil but it hasn’t gone anywhere yet; and before he can lose his nerve he just…grabs it and sticks it back where it belongs.

The boy coughs, lungs suddenly full of breath again and struggling against the smoke, and he’s out of the house, reminding his own lungs to work again and cough realistically, handing the small gasping bundle of human to his mother, and she’s sobbing about _a miracle, a miracle, an angel straight from Heaven—_

He gets out of there as fast as he can, and spends the next forty-eight hours looking over his shoulder and hoping they didn’t notice.

_Ah,_ he thinks, when they kick in the door of his room in an appropriately disreputable inn in Surrey a week later. _They noticed._

He lands face-first on the greasy floor of a small, dark room somewhere in Hell. (All the rooms in Hell are small and dark, so this isn’t much to go on.)

“Ow,” he mutters, and someone standing over him cackles. Hastur. Ugh, this is going nowhere good. Not that there’s anywhere else to go down here.

“Zzztand up, thief.” Beelzebub. Shit shit _shit._

He stumbles to his feet, still trying to get his bearings after the abrupt plunge downward. He’d been dead asleep. Of course he had. That’s when this sort of thing happens.

They’re in a courtroom, one of the little ones. The courtrooms have been popping up like mushrooms in Hell ever since lawyers became a thing and Hell started filling up with them. Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies and Prince of Hell, is sitting on top of the judge’s bench, swinging zir feet off the edge and scowling. Beelzebub is always scowling, but this particular scowl looks unsettlingly pleased.

Dagon is there too, with a predatory expression on their face and a thick ledger in their hands. Beelzebub, Dagon _and_ Hastur. Oh…he is most definitely fucked.

“My Lord.” He manages a passably elaborate bow. “To what do I owe this honor?”

“You know what you’ve done.”

“Er…enlighten me.”

“The _zzzoul._ You zzztole one of ours.”

“Wha—the kid? You’re telling me that _kid_ was bound for Hell? What’s he ever done?” He’s so startled he forgets about faking deference for a moment. “Got to be a clerical error, don’t you think? I might’ve just saved you a whole lot of embarrassing paperwork. When you think about it that way, I practically deserve—”

“There izz no error,” Beelzebub says. “Dagon has confirmed the accounting is accurate.” Dagon taps a finger on their ledger and gives him a lamprey grin. “One soul’s worth of zzzuffering is owed.”

“Er…” Shit, fuck, _think of something._ “Momentary lapse in judgment,” he tries, already feeling like it’s not his best work. “Thought you wouldn’t want a soul so, eh, insufficiently corrupted. Meant to bring you something better, incestuous earl or two, y’know, wanted to surprise you—”

“Silenzzze,” Beelzebub snaps. Crowley shuts his mouth.

Beelzebub draws zirself up to zir full height, which somehow still manages to be intimidating. “Demon Crowley, for the offenzzz of releasing one human soul from the clutches of Hell, I zzzentence you to be remanded to R&D…”

_Fuck._

“…until such time as you are deemed to be appropriately…”

_Tenderized?_ he thinks, but snark really isn’t going to help the situation right now.

“Remorzzzzzful.” He has never seen Beelzebub grin before, and he hopes to Someone he never does again.

The thing to remember about being sent to R&D is that you won’t die. Even if it feels like you’re about to. Or if that option starts to look preferable after a while. Especially not then.

You won’t die, because they don’t want you to. Besides, all of their prototypes are designed to be used on the already dead.

What you will do is suffer whatever new-and-improved sadistic innovation of the week needs a road trial, round and round the test track for as many times as they find amusing. You are not the vehicle in this metaphor. You’re the road.

There’s a strategy to it, taking Hell’s punishments. You can’t start in right away with the crying and the begging for mercy, even if, all things considered, you’d rather take a blow to your dignity than a blow to anything else. They just won’t believe you’re being particularly _sincere,_ if they haven’t adequately demonstrated what it is you ought to be begging for mercy from. Besides, someone who gives in without a fight just isn’t any _fun,_ and violence is one of the few things it’s socially acceptable for demons to find pleasure in. 

No, you’re much wiser to let them enjoy themselves a bit. Let them think they’ve forced some humility from you against your will, taken you down a notch or seven. Start out a bit cocky and let them think they’ve broken you. Make a show of it. Demons love a good performance.

At some point in the middle of it all, he thinks about the fact that Beelzebub might have lied about the boy. (And he’d just walked right into it, hadn’t he?) Maybe the soul wasn’t Hell’s at all. Maybe Heaven had ratted him out. He’s pretty sure they have ways of talking to each other.

After some amount of time (he has no idea how much; time’s always a bit _weird_ in Hell, and he’s pretty sure they make it extra weird in R&D on purpose) someone decides he’s sufficiently contrite. They peel him up off the clammy floor in another small, dark room deep in the rat-maze of R&D and seat him, only moderately wobbly, at a desk in another small, dark room. This one has paperwork.

There’s signing releases and filling out forms in triplicate and yes he understands how very wrong he was and no he will never, ever do it again and yes he knows how very lucky he is to be given a second chance and no he absolutely does not deserve it but yes he is ever so humbly grateful, and then he gets unceremoniously squirted up through the ceiling and back into his shitty room at the inn of questionable repute in Surrey.

He manages to stand up for a whole second before his knees buckle and he collapses on the floor.

For a while he just lies there, cheek pressed against the rough-hewn wood, breathing like a human and trying not to be sick like one. He hates being sick. As human reflexes go, not one of the better ones.

His human body has not a single scratch on it. His demon essence is…well, in rather the state you’d expect from being experimentally metaphysically tortured for an unspecified period of time. He feels flayed raw and selectively scorched and carved up like a pheasant roast (he’s pretty sure all those things actually happened in there somewhere) and a bunch of other unpleasant sensations he is somehow experiencing both distinctly and simultaneously. His throat is raw from all the screamy bits, and from that thing with the eels. His wings— He doesn’t want to think about his wings. He tucks them back out of sight in the next dimension over.

_It’s over,_ he tells himself ten times in a row; twenty times; trying to calm the seasick flood of adrenaline his human corporation seems intent on producing. _It’s over and they let you come back._ He tries to focus on the little Earthly details all around him: the splintery floorboards under his cheek, the slice of moonlight coming in through the open shutters of the room’s small window, the reek of human sweat and ash and smoke still lingering in his clothes and hair. He wouldn’t have thought four days in a fire could smell so sweet, but it’s roses compared to the rotting-flesh stench of Hell.

After a long time, he makes himself sit up and lean gingerly against the bed, his pounding head tipped back against the mattress.

_It’s just pain,_ he thinks. _You’ll live._

He’ll heal. Everything will heal. Not because they _care_ about him or anything, but because pain is more fun as a renewable resource.

It’s night. The disheveled blankets on the bed look exactly as they did when they dragged him out of it. He’s pretty sure no time has passed on Earth at all. The wine he left uncorked on the floor next to the bed hasn’t even gone off.

He grabs the bottle and chugs what’s left of it. It helps a little.

_Would be better with a friend,_ his traitorous brain thinks before he can squash the impulse. Someone to distract him. Produce another bottle so he wouldn’t have to get up. Make him laugh with a terribly inappropriate joke, even though it made his ribs hurt. Offer some comfort, maybe.

He’d seen him, on the edge of the smoke and flame. Miracling singed lungs healed, making sure separated loved ones suddenly found each other in the panicked crowds clamoring at the city’s gates. Doing the exact same thing Crowley was. Their gaze had met, once, through the chaos, and he’d thought the look Aziraphale had given him meant the angel knew that neither of them were there on official business. He thought it had been a look of understanding, and it had felt like a shield as Crowley walked back toward the flames.

_Stop it._ What kind of idiot does he think he is, to go thinking about such things? Right now of all times, as if it isn’t the Goddamned worst idea in the world.

Hell had wanted to teach him a lesson, and they had. They’d taught him that he needed to be a lot more fucking careful from now on.

He drags himself to his feet. Stumbles down the inn’s narrow stairs with gritted teeth. He pays the innkeeper for two weeks’ stay in advance, and two more bottles of wine, along with a generous tip and strict instructions to be left alone. Then he crawls back up the stairs and prepares to sleep for a fortnight.

He wakes, some time later, in the dark. Soft fingers are stroking through his hair.

He groans. He hasn’t slept nearly long enough; everything still hurts quite spectacularly. But _oh,_ the hand in his hair is so gentle, and _warm,_ a warmth that seems to seep down into his bones.

“Oh…my dear boy.” The voice is soft and sad. “What have they done to you?”

“‘S fine,” he mumbles into the bedclothes. “‘M fine. Juss…needa sleep.”

Someone help him, Aziraphale’s fingers in his hair feel so good. He aches with it. He doesn’t know if Aziraphale is healing him; if angels even _can_ heal demonic wounds like these, but his presence alone is soothing. Crowley wants to lean into him, where he can feel his weight settled on the edge of the bed, but he’s too tired to move.

“I’ll be here.”

“Mm,” he mutters. And then: “No…you shouldn’t be…”

“It’s all right.”

But it _isn’t,_ and he’s suddenly swamped by a cold wave of terror. If Hell is watching right now—if he’s put them both in danger—he struggles to get up, to pull himself away from Aziraphale’s side, anything—

“No, you _really_ shouldn’t—”

He jerks awake, for real this time. It’s still night, everything still hurts, and he’s alone.

_Relief._ The appropriate emotion to be feeling in this moment should be relief, that Aziraphale hadn’t actually been there, because that would be an absolutely _monumentally_ stupid thing to want right now. But instead, all he feels is a bitter wash of disappointment.

A dream. Of course it had been a dream. An atrociously maudlin one at that. He’d imagined it, just as he’d imagined the tiny rush of air filling a void previously occupied by a body as he woke up. Having an imagination was rubbish sometimes.

_Go back to sleep,_ he orders himself. _Go back to sleep and behave like a fucking demon should for once, and don’t you dare dream about anything at all._ That was exactly his problem, wasn’t it? He should know better than to think he could get away with _that._

**Author's Note:**

> Up to you whether it really was a dream or a sneaky angelic intervention...
> 
> Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com)


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